Bad Ending (Agent Juliet Book 5) Read online

  “I still think this is a damn fool thing to do,” Harris said.

  “Two days,” I said. “Then disappear.”

  Harris heaved a big sigh and adjusted the sawed-off shotgun on her shoulder.

  “Swear,” I said.

  “A’ight,” she said. “Two days.”

  *****

  I left the pickup truck in the long-term parking at the airport and headed inside.

  Everything felt weirdly final. Even printing out the boarding passes at the kiosk, even though I’d never done that before. I set my boots on the little conveyer belt to get X-rayed, went through the metal detector, got them back and put them on.

  Then I sat down and stared out the window at the planes, trying not to think about how I was probably never coming back.

  *****

  My flight got into LaGuardia just before noon. There was a guy at the gate holding a sign that said J KENDRICK. I was still fuzzy from zonking out on the flight and it took me a second to realize he was there for me.

  I started to turn around and head the other way.

  “All of the exits are covered,” he said.

  Of course they were. What had I thought, that Dr. White would expect me to take two priceless scientific breakthroughs on the train?

  “You’re alone?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He reached into his jacket. For a second, I couldn’t believe that anybody would have the balls to shoot somebody in a crowded terminal, but instead of a gun, the guy pulled out a phone.

  “Target is alone,” he said. “Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.”

  He hung up.

  “This way, Mr. Kendrick,” he said.

  I followed him out to the pick-up/drop-off parking. He opened the back door of the car for me.

  As I was climbing in, he grabbed the back of my neck and slammed my head against the door frame.

  *****

  When I came back around, I was zip-tied to a folding chair in an empty room. Brick, covered in chipped layers of sea foam green paint. An old industrial clock with a yellowing face was bolted to one wall inside a wire cage. A commando in black fatigues was stationed at the door.

  “Where’s your boss at?” I asked.

  He didn’t react.

  “Dr. White? I kind of have a meeting with her today.”

  Nothing.

  Since he didn’t seem to care, I fought with the zip-ties for a while, but all it did was tear up my wrists and hike the cuffs of my jeans up to my ankles.

  “I don’t suppose you would loosen these up a bit?”

  Blank stare.

  “No, you wouldn’t. You like your dates defenseless.”

  The door opened. An older lady in a lab coat and corporate casual clothes came in.

  “You’re wasting your breath,” she said. “He doesn’t care if you insult him. He’s a prefab—a Mark-19 model. They are human intelligence without emotional complication. The perfect dovetail of behavioral science and technology. The future of modern warfare.”

  “Jesus, you scientists have a longwinded way of saying ‘cyborg.’”

  She pushed her glasses back up her nose and smiled one of those smiles people do when they know they have the upper hand.

  “That’s very cute,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. My name is Dr. White.”

  “I figured. I’d shake your hand, but…” I jerked my arms against the ties.

  “Be thankful,” she said. “The only reason I didn’t have you executed the second you landed alone is because the girls’ signals are offline. I assume you removed their tracking chips?”

  “You didn’t have backups?” I shook my head. “Shit, honey, that sucks.”

  “Where are my girls?” Dr. White asked.

  “They ain’t yours,” I said.

  “I created them. They’re mine and I have the contracts to prove it. Now, where are my girls?”

  “I left them with my buddy,” I said. “He lives over on Go Fuck Yourself Street, next to the CVS.”

  Dr. White’s smile never slipped. She turned around and went to the door. Knocked twice.

  There was some kind of disturbance out in the hall, then the door opened.

  Another prefab, leading Romeo by her elbow. Her arms were cuffed behind her back. Her left eye was swollen shut. The split in her lip went halfway down her chin.

  I clenched my fists and twisted until the zip-ties cut into my skin. The blood felt hot sliding down my palms.

  “What’s the matter, Jamie?” Dr. White asked. “Nothing snarky to add? Can’t handle seeing the damage your poor decision-making caused? Well, get a good look. She’s hurt because of you. This is your fault.”

  “I’ll kill you,” I told Dr. White. “I’ll put your face under a truck tire and back up so slow you’ll feel every bone crack.”

  “It sounds as if you’re finally starting to understand the gravity of the situation,” Dr. White said. She nodded at the prefab holding Romeo up.

  He shoved Romeo to her knees in front of me.

  “Jamie Kendrick, meet Rachel Gutierrez, from Phoenix, Arizona,” Dr. White said. “Rachel is the only surviving child of Luis and the late Mary Catherine Gutierrez. All three of Rachel’s older brothers were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

  “You shut your bitch mouth,” Romeo growled.

  “Rachel is the light of her poor daddy’s life,” Dr. White said. “All he has left now that Mary Catherine lost that battle with breast cancer.”

  “Don’t talk about my parents, you cunt!”

  “You probably already know everything about Jamie, don’t you Rachel?” Dr. White shook her head. “And yet NOC-Unit completely overlooked your potential as a Mata Hari. Such a waste.”

  Dr. White held her hand out to one of the prefabs. He gave her his sidearm. Very slowly, almost like she was trying to be careful, Dr. White put the gun to the back of Romeo’s neck.

  “Oh God,” Romeo whispered.

  “Tell me where you left the girls, Jamie, or Rachel dies,” Dr. White said.

  My heart was hammering. My throat was dry. I twisted and jerked on my arms, but I couldn’t budge those fucking zip-ties.

  “You love her, don’t you?” Dr. White asked like she understood. “You don’t need to feel guilty about giving up the girls to save her. I’ll take care of Della and Eva. Protect them. Teach them how to use their gifts. Tell me where they are and the two of you are free to go.”

  I wished I was a better operative. A stone-cold badass who could break out of the chair, kill everyone, and save Romeo.

  Worse, I wished I could tell Dr. White where the girls were. I tried to convince myself that it would buy me time to get Romeo to safety. Then I could find Whiskey and work out a plan to get the girls back. It wasn’t like Dr. White could kill Della or Eva. It wouldn’t be so bad, right?

  Except I knew that if I told Dr. White, she would kill us both, then go get the girls herself.

  Dr. White shifted feet and dug the gun deeper into the back of Romeo’s neck.

  “Romeo isn’t like Della or Eva,” Dr. White said. “She’s no different than you or me, Jamie. She can’t survive a gunshot to the head.”

  Romeo locked eyes with me. A big, fat tear tracked through the blood on Romeo’s face and dripped off her jaw, begging me. She didn’t want to die.

  I tried to make my eyes tell her everything—the way Eva had screamed when I told her the prefabs would take her back to Dr. White, how they were turning Della into a bloodthirsty little psycho, why I couldn’t give the girls up no matter how much I wanted to.

  I saw the second Romeo realized I wasn’t going to save her. Her mouth dropped open and the air rushed out of her lungs as if she’d been kicked. The tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Dr. White saw it, too.

  “I’m not playing around here,” she said, voice high and strung too tight. “If you don’t—”

  “What, do you think he’s deaf?” Romeo said. “He
heard you the first time.”

  Dr. White’s gun-hand started to shake. “Tell me where they are!”

  “Just fucking do it already, you coward bitch,” Romeo yelled.

  The gun went off.

  Romeo pitched forward. She flailed and twisted on the floor, gasping for air.

  It wasn’t a clean shot. I remember some part of my brain telling me that Dr. White must’ve flinched when she pulled the trigger because, instead of going through Romeo’s skull, the bullet had traveled at a downward angle through her chest and out her ribcage. It probably tore everything up, but it didn’t kill her outright. There was still time, my brain said, she could still be saved.

  I screamed at Dr. White to help Romeo, but Dr. White backed away. Shoved the gun at a prefab, then ran out of the room.

  I begged the prefabs to do something. They wouldn’t even acknowledge me.

  Romeo choked. Blood gurgled in her throat, bubbled from her mouth and nose.

  I rocked my chair until it tipped over sideways. Tried to push myself across the floor with the toe of my boot and my arm. It didn’t work. I couldn’t get any closer to her.

  Romeo lived for another eight minutes. I know because I kept looking up at the clock, praying that this minute would be the one when someone came running back in to save her.

  I talked to her. I told her I was sorry. I lied and told her help was coming.

  It took Romeo eight minutes to drown in her own blood.

  *****

  You know when you’re in so much pain that your mind just sort of goes off on its own? Back when my sister-in-law Talia was still alive, she had called it drifting.

  Lying on my side in that sea foam green room, watching Romeo’s blood spread across the floor toward me, then feeling it soak into my sleeve and the leg of my jeans—that was too much. My brain couldn’t deal with it.

  Instead, it thought back to Dr. White. The way she had held the gun like she was afraid of it. The way she kept swearing she would kill Romeo if I didn’t tell her. The way her face lost color when she realized she had shot someone.

  Dr. White didn’t have any idea what she was doing. She wasn’t a field operative or an interrogator. She was just a scientist who wanted her lab rats back. Threatening Romeo had been her only plan. She’d been sure that would work and when it hadn’t, she’d freaked out and screwed up.

  I started to laugh. Not a calm, James Bond kind of chuckle. Something a little more hysterical. There was a pretty good chance Dr. White would resort to something more drastic now, but the worst she could do was hurt me and that wouldn’t be enough.

  *****

  According to that clock, Dr. White was gone for almost three hours—plenty of time for the stench of blood and postmortem bodily functions to permanently sear themselves into my brain.

  When she finally did come back, she had on a sweat suit that was too big for her and her hair was wet as if she’d taken a shower. She stopped just inside the door and put a hand to her nose, overwhelmed by the smell. She scowled down at me.

  “I told you I would kill her if you didn’t tell me where the girls were,” she said.

  “You know what I would’ve done?” I said, smiling at her. “If I had gone to the trouble of tracking down your husband? Or kids or grandkids—I ain’t picky—but let’s say husband for now.”

  Dr. White’s eyes narrowed.

  “The girls, Jamie,” she said. “I don’t want to have to kill you, too.”

  “I wouldn’t have killed him,” I said. “I would’ve shoved barbed wire down his throat while you watched, then ripped it back out. I would’ve cut his balls off, burnt him, beat him, poured acid on him—all right in front of you—until you begged to tell me what I wanted to know.”

  She turned to the prefab. “Extract the location of the KiloT-4 girls from this man.”

  The prefab came around Romeo, went behind me.

  I tried to brace myself. According to the reading Whiskey had made me do on torture, interrogators usually started with the fingers or toes because of all the nerve endings. My hands and feet had been tied up for such a long time that they’d gone numb, so maybe that would work to my advantage.

  The prefab stomped on my arm, just under the elbow. Even without the splintery double-crack or the feeling of bone tearing through muscle and skin, I would’ve known that the arm was broken because the chair leg it was tied to had bent into a V-shape on impact.

  “Where are the girls, Jamie?” Dr. White yelled over my screaming. “Tell me and I’ll call him off.”

  I just kept screaming. It probably would’ve taken more effort to stop. Especially when the prefab grabbed ahold of the bone sticking through my skin and started twisting it.

  *****

  I don’t know how many times I passed out, but the last time I did, I woke up strapped to a table in a bright, sterile-looking room.

  “Hey, Jamieboy.” Owen was standing next to the table.

  “Ah, shit.” I had to stop and swallow so I wouldn’t spit blood when I talked. “Am I dead?”

  “Just a little while longer, a’ight?”

  “Until what?”

  An electronic door whirred open somewhere behind me. Dr. White came around the table.

  “I went about this the wrong way,” she said. “My logic was built on the flawed assumption that you’re afraid of death. But the drinking, the drugs, the complete lack of regard for health or safety… You don’t give a damn, do you, Jamie? The whole point of your life has been to get it over with as quickly as possible.”

  “To be fair—” I swallowed again. “To be fair, it was also to get laid as much as possible.”

  “Keep making jokes,” she said. “Maybe that will get you through the next fifty years.”

  I heard the door open again and what sounded like a cart being rolled into the room.

  “Thank you, nurse,” Dr. White said to someone outside my field of vision. Then she turned back to me. “Your little tantrum earlier actually gave me a good idea, Jamie. Some of the examples were a little impractical if the goal was to keep the subject alive and in pain for as long as possible, but— Well, you must know what KiloT-4 does, or we wouldn’t be here.”

  Someone wearing latex gloves handed her a pair of surgical shears.

  “A series of injections into your femoral bone marrow, a few hours for gestation, and then nothing but instant decapitation will kill you,” Dr. White said, slicing open the leg of my jeans. “Trust me, Jamie, everything that’s happened up to now is going to seem like a fond memory. Just ask your new prefab friend. You and he are going to be spending a lot of time together.”

  I had to squeeze my eyes shut and bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep from outright bawling. The thought of more of this—day after day of this, on into forever—Jesus. I told myself I just had to hold out for however many of the forty-eight hours were left. Once Harris disappeared with the girls, I wouldn’t be able to give them up.

  “Just a little bit longer, Jamieboy,” Owen said.

  “Marrow needle, please,” Dr. White said.

  Something plastic fell on the floor, bounced, and rolled.

  “I’m sorry,” a woman’s voice said. “My hands are just—”

  “It’s fine,” Dr. White said. “It’s not as if an infection from the procedure will kill him.”

  “Now,” Owen said.

  I opened my eyes.

  Dr. White was bent over with her back to the table, reaching for something. A thick little white-haired nurse stepped up behind Dr. White, packing a green and gray oxygen tank. She swung. Connected with the side of Dr. White’s head.

  Dr. White hit the floor and slid.

  Nurse Regina dropped the oxygen tank, came back to the table, and started undoing the straps.

  “Can you walk?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I made it half a step before my legs gave out. Nurse Regina caught me.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re fine.”


  “Now’s definitely the time to be sarcastic,” I said. “It’s really helpful.”

  “Come on, smart guy,” Nurse Regina said. She put my unbroken arm over her shoulder.

  I had to lean pretty much all my weight on her, but Nurse Regina was a tough little broad. She walked us over to the doors and hit the button with her hip. It whirred open.

  Behind us, Dr. White moaned.

  “Damn thick-headed doctors,” Regina said, picking up the pace. “I was hoping that tap had killed her.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  We came to another set of automatic doors. Nurse Regina opened those the same way, then led us to the right. Carpeted floors, beige walls, an elevator where the hall turned. This looked more like the NOC-Unit headquarters that I was used to.

  “What floor are we on?” I asked.

  “Basement 2—only medical and research staff have clearance.”

  An alarm started screaming. The hall went dark and red security lights came on. We broke into an awkward limp-run.

  “Dammit,” Nurse Regina said, out of breath. “Elevator’ll shut down. Stairs around the corner. Come on.”

  We were almost to the turn in the hallway.

  Two NOC-Unit commandos came around the corner, one low and one high. I saw the M16s before anything else. I swung around in front of Nurse Regina and tried to shield her as much as I could, even though I knew it wouldn’t matter. At this range, the bullets would cut right through me.

  “Juliet, drop,” Whiskey yelled.

  All those drills over the last five months had conditioned my brain to do whatever Whiskey ordered. I didn’t even think. I just dropped, pulling Nurse Regina down with me.

  For a few seconds, the gunfire drowned out the alarms.

  “Clear,” Bravo yelled.

  I lifted my head. Whiskey, Fox, Mike, Bravo, and a few operatives I didn’t know jogged down the hall. I looked back toward the operating room. A pile-up of operatives I hadn’t even heard coming up behind us. They would’ve taken me and Regina down before we realized what was happening.

  “Luke, take your team and keep the stairwell clear,” Whiskey said.

  The operatives I didn’t know broke off and headed back the direction they had come.